The exhibition João Simões (Luanda, 1971) now presents at the Zé dos Bois marks his return to the Portuguese exhibition scene after almost two decades of international touring. Contrary to what might be expected, however, this is not an apotheotic reappearance. This is not the exhibition where we’ll find João Simões “as we have never seen him before”, reinvented in his artistic practice, presenting a vast set of pieces where we can finally gauge the countless inflections that his work has known in these years of drift abroad. Quite the contrary: this is an exhibition where we find João Simões’ work in his most concentrated, stripped-down, economic version. In fact, this is a one-piece exhibition. In it, we recognize the analytical and conceptual frame to which the artist has accustomed us since the mid-1990s, but this time anchored in a peculiar phenomenon: in the surprising event of finding a particular set of fruits and establishing between them a whole complex of relations which put in question notions such as emptiness and progression, measure and infinite, suggestion and presence, search and invention, power and restraint, chance and work – all of which draw attention to the way the binary matrix of our knowledge produces a Manichean context that deals with the same level of mistrust and awe for diversion, for the rare, for the unusual.
